


Good to Eat a Thousand Years

by ghosttopiary



Category: Merlin (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Violence, Getting Together, M/M, Tenderness, Vignette, love is a Choice tm, the emotional fallout of your dad being a dictator, they are exceptionally bad at communicating but it turns out alright i promise
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-10
Updated: 2020-08-10
Packaged: 2021-03-06 03:46:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,444
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25826887
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ghosttopiary/pseuds/ghosttopiary
Summary: He kisses his lover on the nape of his neck and thinks this is why men go to war. A shameful thought.
Relationships: Merlin/Arthur Pendragon (Merlin)
Comments: 22
Kudos: 124





	Good to Eat a Thousand Years

**Author's Note:**

> i did a prompt ask meme and then my hands slipped and now we're here, oops.
> 
> there is some canon-typical violence in here !! although it may not be very graphic, please heed the warnings in the tags if that is something you'd like to avoid. as for the setting, i have yet to actually finish the show, and instead of doing so and then writing this i simply made up what i think should happen<3 in case this turns out to be exactly, word for word what happens, sorry not sorry bbc.
> 
> thank you to Jackie for letting me scream about this in your dms, and for being such a good sport about my deranged ramblings.
> 
> finally: this fic is a gift for Noah, whom i love most dearly. i could write many paragraphs on what it is that makes you such an incredible human being, but instead im just giving you this. hope you enjoy it.

for the prompts: merthur - _trying to walk on ice, reflections in glass, the smell of burning wood, the feel of fingertips trailing over a bare shoulder blade-the feel of fingers brushing together by accident-a person’s weight as they lie on top of you, a door closing, the jittery, sick feeling when you can’t do anything_

Once, when he was little, Merlin’s mother told him love takes as many forms as there are stars in the sky. That night, the 9 year-old that he was, he had determinedly sat down and tried his hardest to count every star that he could see, stubbornly dedicated to finding the exact number, the equation for love.

For adult Merlin, very little has changed. He knows there are more than one could ever count (he had asked Gaius once, and received only an incredulous look in return), but he still cannot help but try anyways. For adult Merlin, it goes something like this: in winter, Arthur drags him out to a lake in the forest that has been completely frozen over. He brazenly exclaims that _In the north people go out on the ice like this all the time for fun, god, Merlin, stop being such a coward and come out here already_.

Merlin, hummingbird heart, cannot help but to oblige. He steps onto the slippery surface, knees trembling and arms shooting out as though he could grab the air for support. It feels like flying, kind of, except not at all. He can barely see down into the muddy lake floor before it turns into murky darkness, and he feels simultaneously very high up and too close to anything that might be hiding below. One more step, sliding before finding traction, and he yelps out loud. He has actually flown before, and he was way better at that. Better than at metaphors, too.

He looks up, and sees Arthur watching him. Scarf around his neck, blowing hot air into his hands. Giddy, excited expression on his face, although Merlin is pretty sure what he is excited for is to see Merlin fall on his ass. His cheeks are rosy, warmed by the biting cold of December air, he is looking _directly_ at him, joy in the crinkles of his eyes and grinning teeth. Merlin feels like the wind is taken out of him several seconds before his butt makes contact with the ice.

-

Sometimes he looks like Merlin’s companion, his friend. Someone he has seen covered in mud and barely awake and horribly hungover (and all three simultaneously once, hilariously).

Sometimes though, he looks like a king. Standing tall at the altar of some royal ceremony, Merlin thinks he could be part of the stain-glass windows that surround them. He stares unabashedly, the way he could only do from the safety of a crowd like this, committing every last detail to memory. Eyes-lips-nose, set determination of his jaw. Crown on his head and jewels hanging around his neck and sword in hand and steel in his demeanor. Merlin holds his breath as the priest utters something about _birthright, holy inheritance, a new and righteous era for the Kingdom_. Merlin thinks he could kiss the sword in his hands, hold the blade tender like a lover and place himself under the deadly edge. He doesn't tell anyone this, but he cannot wipe the image from his mind, as he comes into his own fist later that night.

-

When they sit around burning wood, exhausted and spent and loose-lipped, is when it happens. It. Like he has imagined a thousand and more times – stumbling over It like a misplaced broom or a dent in the road. They are all ragged-breath and dizzy heads from blood loss. The beasts they defeated lay crumpled in a chasm some hundred metres away, and they managed to walk far away enough to escape the scent of rotted flesh and venomous teeth and ghosts of villagers that met their fates under them. They set up camp like a ritual, like this every time: banter and exhausted huffs of laughter and faux-serious usage of hierarchical commands (Arthur) and snide jokes about lack of fighting skills (Merlin).

“You should see the other guy,” Arthur quips in between gasps of pain as Merlin cleans and wraps his wounds. Merlin smacks his un-chewed shoulder in retaliation. Tells him he talks an awful lot for someone who got nearly bitten in half by some overgrown lizards. They bury their choked up throats and trembling hands somewhere outside of the light of the campfire, unspoken. Don’t think of the wrecked villages or the people they couldn’t save until the fire goes out, and they lie down close and huddled and pretend not to hear each other’s wet and hitching breaths. Sometimes Arthur will wake up screaming the night after a battle, and when they wake up in a knit of limbs sewn tight under one sleeping bag neither of them speak of it.

Usually, that is.

Except this time. This time when Merlin bandages Arthur’s naked chest, he won’t stop looking at him, even when Merlin goes for a somewhat uninspired insult about how he maybe should take up sparring with the 10-year olds again.

“What?” he blurts, against his will.

Arthur says nothing, keeps looking at him intently like he is trying to figure something out.

“Do I got something on my face?” Retreat, avoid.

His face sets, determined. “Tell me if you hate this,” he says, and that's all the warning he gets before he surges forward, cupping Merlin’s face with his broad hands and kissing the living daylights out of him.

Merlin doesn’t catch the sound that comes out of him in time, escaping his lips and into Arthur’s mouth. He feels dizzy, like the ground has been pulled out from under him like a rug. He clambers more firmly into his lap, grabs his shoulders for support and breathes ragged against his lips as they take a break, forehead against forehead.

“ _What,_ ” he finally exclaims. “What. What.”

Now, Arthur has the nerve to look sheepish. Merlin feels vaguely like he wants to punch him.

“Was that… bad?”

Merlin buries his face in his hands and groans, cursing out whatever god is so hell bent on making him suffer like this.

( _Yeah,_ he says later. _You should try it again._ )

-

Merlin learns how to kiss like this, against Arthur’s mouth. He isn’t Arthur’s first, as he proudly declares on several occasions, once with his lips swollen from making out for hours. Merlin retaliates by biting down on his tongue. Tells him he feels sorry for whatever poor town girl that had to be subjected to this sorry excuse for a snog.

But this, touch, they learn from each other.

Merlin has heard the knights talking about it with each other, in the distinctly knightly way where they call it their conquests. It doesn’t feel like subjugation to him, the way Arthur’s hands roam his body with reverence. Merlin cannot resist the temptation of making himself look like one though, under his thorough ministrations. Arches his back and mewls into his mouth as he jerks at his cock. Writhes and whimpers as Arthur opens him up, shakily the way they had figured it out from old books and offhand talk from the more worldly knights.

Merlin grasps at the back of his neck, pulls him down and kisses at the corner of his open mouth, unadulterated affection. The weight of his sturdy body above him makes him feel like molten gold, liquid and valuable. When Arthur slides into him their fingers brush together, interlacing against the mattress above his head.

Merlin feels turned inside out by desire, skin electric. Blush stretched over his chest, giving away all of his secrets as though his rhythmic whines and moans didn’t already. As though the praises whispered into his body didn’t set his nerve endings on fire even more than the cock in his ass.

When he comes it's with a sob of Arthur’s name, and it’s a confession.

-

The part after might be his favorite. It’s liminal, as he traces constellations over Arthur’s bare shoulder. Like this he is just a person, and Merlin is just a person, and neither of them are affected by grand plans or epic fates or the conflicts of interest of nations.

He thinks about escaping all of this, about them being just this - two lovers somewhere where their names carry no more meaning than the sound they utter. He doesn’t say it out loud. Arthur would never forgive him.

He has carried the burden of Camelot before he could walk, carries it with unfathomable pride. It isn’t just the title for him. Royalty is something so intricately linked to his being Merlin could never separate one from the other, could never even begin to disentangle the threads connecting Arthur to His Royal Highness King Arthur Pendragon of Camelot.

He kisses his lover on the nape of his neck and thinks this is why men go to war. A shameful thought.

-

When he finds out, Arthur’s eyes betray hurt for only a sliver of a moment before they turn to steel. Judgment and punishment have never come naturally to him, he wears them as a stiff piece of armor even now. Merlin wishes he would banish him from the kingdom. It would hurt less.

-

They don’t talk for a month. Arthur is all shifty eyes and rigid silence, makes it loud in a way only he could. Merlin grits his teeth, pride tucked in his pocket like a good luck charm, and says nothing.

Even the other castle residents seem to take note, the knights giving them a wide berth and Guinevere and Morgana exchanging increasingly meaningful glances, raised eyebrows and quick nods of their heads when they think Merlin doesn’t notice.

Until one day where Gaius finally snaps after Merlin spends the entire afternoon zoning out while gazing wistfully out the window and sighing deep, angsty sighs and tells him to Just Go Talk To Him, Or So Help Me God.

And so Merlin swallows his ego down, bitter grating pill. Paces thirteen times outside Arthur’s quarters in jittery indecision until he calls out come in, muffled through the thick wooden door.

He freezes once he sees Merlin, standing like a frightened forest animal at his doorstep.

 _Click._ Door closing behind him.

“Um,” Merlin is the first to break the silence, first to drop his weapon. Like always.

Arthur just regards him, jaw set, eyes betraying nothing other than distance. Click, indeed.

“Listen, can we just– I know you’re angry with me but can we please just talk about it?”

Still no answer. The twitch in is jaw, a habit he had never quite shaken, is a tell enough for Merlin to barrel through.

“I didn’t choose to be like this Arthur,” he says, pleads.

This has an effect, this puts the stone of his body in motion.

“You–!” stuttered out, harsh exhale of breath. “Do you think I’m mad at you because you have magic?”

“I mean,” a twist of his foot, a pinch between his eyebrows. “Yeah?”

Arthur is all hard lines, drawn from the base of his spine to the tips of his ears. Cheeks blotchy with emotion, brows furiously set. This, Merlin knows how to deal with.

“God you are _so–!_ ”

He chokes on his own sentence, red hot anger like a jagged dagger.

“I don’t care that you have magic. I care that you apparently didn’t fucking trust me enough to tell me, Merlin. All of the time we’ve spent together and you never even, you were lying to me that whole time. I thought– god, it doesn’t even matter.”

“Oh yeah? Well I am so sorry your father made it a crime punishable by death for me to have been born. For me to have to watch my own back all the time just in case someone caught me in the shameful act of existing.” Merlin feels his own blood rush in his ears, hot and pulsing.

At the mention of his father, Arthur’s face sobers like someone has doused him in ice water.

“My father–”

“I had to watch him condemn people like me to death _every day,_ Arthur. Do you have any idea what that is like?”

Merlin watches him still, counts to five, thinks is this what reckoning is like. It’s nothing like the triumphant songs of war heroes they played at Arthur’s coronation. He feels something in his chest cave inwards. There’s a bitter taste at the back of his throat.

“I could have helped,” Arthur says, voice quiet.

The room falls silent, air carrying a frigid sort of chill and suddenly Merlin feels exhausted with it all. He deflates, breath seeping out of him like the dying embers of a fire burnt down to coal.

“Yeah, maybe you could have. But I didn’t know that, and neither did you. I’m allowed self-preservation, Arthur, not just for my sake but for yours too. And I’m just so, so tired of tragedy.”

Arthur stays silent for a long time, face betraying nothing but deep thought. And then, cosmic shift, deliberation gives way to determination.

He makes the same face as when he drives his sword into an enemy, killing blow. Leaping into the open roaring maw of the beast and says “Merlin, I’m in love with you.”

Merlin chokes on his own spit.

“You– _what!_ ”

“I’m in love with you, Merlin. And if I’m not a complete fool, I think you love me too. Am I right?”

Merlin stands frozen, at a complete loss for words. Arthur has always been like this, he thinks. Brave and brazen, lion heart. His heart picks up at a double-triple speed as warmth blooms from the depth of his chest, unfurls like a blossoming flower all the way out to his fingertips. Stomach swooping and legs unsteady like there is still ice under his feet after all this time he says “Yes. Yeah.”

And Arthur has a million, billion stars in his eyes when he answers “Then I think we have all the means to escape tragedy, still.”

-

Years later, after their love has been shaped smooth in the spaces between them by their devotion and by the words shared between them, Merlin will bury his face in the nape of Arthur’s neck and whisper _everything in my life has led me to you_ (in not so many words). Will think _this is how I will count the stars, in the shape of your name_. And Arthur will laugh and call him a sap, interlace their fingers, gold against gold.

**Author's Note:**

> title is taken from [Howl](http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49303/howl) by Allen Ginsberg


End file.
